


Caged

by DHW



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 05:38:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7254526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DHW/pseuds/DHW
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn’t until people went missing that the panicking began.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caged

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer:** I do not own these characters. They belong to JKR. I make no money.

\---

 

In the end, it wasn’t a wand that gave me freedom from the Ward, but steel. Sharp, glimmering steel, shaped like a sliver of moonlight, calling to me with liquid clarity. A scalpel blade with a hole in one end where the handle was supposed to fit. It came wrapped in brown paper, the words STERILE printed upon one side. Of course, I knew it wasn’t. It had spent almost a quarter a century out of its box before I found it, jammed between the skirting board and wall by my bed. But that didn’t matter. It was useful all the same.  
****

I was twenty years old then. One of the First, incarcerated mere months after the end of the war. I was a celebrity, a target. After all, it pays to eliminate those in public eye first. Demoralise the others who still hold that tiny spark of hope, quash the last of the meagre resistance. I don’t think anyone really believed the Muggles would follow through with their threats back then. The wizarding world at large believed them to benign, carefully avoiding mention of guns and other such instruments of fear.

  
It wasn’t until people went missing that the panicking began.

Children were snatched from their beds in the middle of the night, mothers taken from the parks and schools in a puff of gun-smoke. Academics fell prey to their own experiments, disappearing in a swirl of blood too small to be fatal. Wands shattered in hands, splinters coating the streets. And one by one, we began to vanish.

I remember the day I was taken. It was sunny and warm. Abnormally so, in fact. I was on my way to the library, gathering research for my newest project; the Effect of Transfiguration upon Biological Bodies at the Molecular Level was going to be the paper that made me. I could feel it. So close to groundbreaking research that the loss was all the more painful for me.

There were footsteps. They were fast and sharp, approaching from behind. I didn’t dare turn, afraid of what lurked in my shadow. I was muggleborn, after all, and I remembered full well the devastation that could be caused without access to magic. My world had become the stuff of horror films, and anything went as long as it made my heart beat a little faster in my chest.

I ran, through the crowded streets of London, fighting my way through those who sought to see me behind bars. I was their ticket out of the whole mess they had created, you see. With my magic, fossil fuels were a thing of the past. No more global warming, and no more rogue wizards. Two birds slaughtered with a single, self-righteous stone, media-spin persuading even the most sympathetic of Muggles to the cause. Hands, seemingly more bone than flesh, clawed at my trembling frame, slowing me down. Every step became harder until I could move no more, the press of hot bodies against my own sickening. There was pain too, blossoming from a bullet in my shoulder like a grotesque, bloodied flower. I descended into a world of darkness.

Even now, I have no idea who took me, or where. When I awoke, my world was white and tiled, the reek of disinfectant invading my nostrils. I was numb, my movements out of sync with my mind. It was disturbing, watching my fingers tug at the ends of the wires and the tubes inserted beneath my skin minutes after I told myself to do so. They were siphoning off my magic, feeding it into a generator that hummed and whirred behind the wall. I felt drained beyond belief, my mind focusing on nothing but the ache in my shoulder and leg. The bullet had gone, but there was something new, alien, in my thigh. Something made of circuit boards and codes, making the muscle twitch as sent out a signal. An identi-chip, recording my every breath, my every movement. It was terrifying, and I sat in a stupor, knowing I could not escape from the nightmare I had found myself in.

That is the first I remember of the Ward. The days were hazy to begin with, the sedatives in my system dulling both the pain and my wit. I developed a resistance over time, but could do nothing. I simply lay upon the hard mattress of my cot, staring at the tiled ceiling, the strip-lighting burning itself into my brain.

Somewhere along the line, in the near decade I spent within those tiled walls, I forgot my name, my identity. I was number 723F, ‘F’ for First Generation. And that was all there was to me; I was nothing but a number and a collection of bones wrapped in skin. There were others on the Ward, but they never spoke. They never moved either. It was only later that I discovered they were shadows, bodies left to rot whilst their magic was stolen from them in their drug-induced sleep. Perhaps, had I the wit to look closer, I would have discovered this for myself. But I had enough nightmares by then. When I closed my eyes, I was stalked by demons and devils, fiery eyes burning holes in my soul, waking me in a cold sweat to the sound of the generator.

Sometimes I wonder what I would have done had I not been captured. Marriage? Children? Not that it matters anymore. That future is lost to me, as it is to everyone else cursed with the damn magic. Life has always been unfair, they tell me, only I had never noticed until then. Until everything was ripped away from me.

But, I digress.

Freedom came to me in the form of a scalpel. A gift, of a sort. And Lucius would say it was what I did with the gift that mattered. The object itself was nothing other than dead metal, but I was so much more. Living, breathing, thinking, and, most importantly, acting.

With the blade, I sliced the identi-chip from my leg. It was deep. Far deeper than I had expected, lying between muscle and bone. It was slippery too, the tiny capsule coated in a sticky, red liquid that oozed from the self-inflicted wound. The pain I felt then was like nothing I had ever experienced before; white-hot and almost blinding, it shot through every nerve, my head swirling as my body silently screamed. Even now, almost two decades later, the scar still aches.

Courage is an odd thing, and I often wonder how I managed to gather enough of it to do the deed. To reach deep inside one’s own skin, a place where even the magic can’t go, is a terrifying thing. Unnatural. But it was done nonetheless, and I escaped, sliding out of the hospital doors with the darkness.

I arrived here soon after. This sanctuary, and I think of it as such, in a world that turned its back on me. It is little more than a rotting relic of an era history was glad to see pass, once a house, if not a home, to man made of mystery. Spinners End. And who would have thought it? The house of turncoat the last stronghold of wizarding kind. It’s almost laughable in a bitter sort of way.

How I found it, this place of refuge, is not important, just as how you found yourself here is not important to me. It is something we have all had to endure. Something personal that sets us apart from those not strong enough to fight. But, the fact of the matter is that I found myself here, amongst the people of my past, and I began to live again. True, it wasn’t the life I had dreamt, but it was good enough.

There have been a lot of people in this place since then. Some I recognised, and some I didn’t. Most don’t live for more than three years, hunted down like animals. They get careless, stay out for too long in the sunshine, or stray too close to the edges of the city. And we are left to pick up the pieces, to comfort any left behind. It’s a horrible job, but someone has to do it, and as much as Snape has changed, grown even, his comfort comes in the form of shelter and food rather than echoes of false sentiment.

I guess, in that respect, we are very much alike. We provide for those who cannot, offering our souls in hope that the world will change for the better. It is a vain hope at that, but it is one we share. We both remember what it was like before the legislation. Before the government told us we were no longer human.

But, again, my mind wanders and I stray from my tale.

I arrived here nineteen years ago to the day, dressed in little more than a hospital gown, trailing wires and tubes sliced from their sockets. It took near enough two days, two pain-filled days to remove the last of the plastic and copper from my body. But, when the deed was done, I felt lighter than I had in a long time. I was free. A sensation I had almost forgotten.

Times were harder back then, the witch-hunt (no pun intended) more vicious than most of you can imagine. And it was through these days of terror that we forged relationships I’d never imagined possible. I took tea with Lucius Malfoy on a regular basis, much to my own private amusement. A Muggle-born and a Death Eater sharing anecdotes over sweet biscuits. He was as sharp as ever, but there was an underlying softness to his tones. He missed his family as much as I did mine, and I was a new replacement just like the others at the house, filling a gap in the heart I didn’t know he had. He bought it mere months after I arrived, shot dead as he tried to enter the city.

I shed a tear for him. In fact, I’ve shed more tears than I care to count. From the six that sheltered here in the beginning, only Snape and I remain. Of course, there is Albus, but he is nothing more than paint and canvas.

I think that was why our affair began. We were both lonely, longing for another warm body to fill an empty bed. At first, it was just conversation and company, staving off the cold as we lay together, clothed and as respectable as one can be in these situations. We talked for hours about nothing in particular.

However, as the death toll rose, we became something more. We gave truth to the rumours that so wildly circulated. What had been comfort grew to love with the passage of time. I am a very private person, but this I deem important enough to share. You need to know that light can be found in the darkness, however faint the glimmer may seem. All that waits for you is insanity otherwise.

I was a product of Hogwarts’ sex education, just as he was. And, looking back, perhaps it would have been better to have taken more precautions. But the feel of his skin against mine was electric, addictive to the point of pain. From him came pleasure, flaring up inside me with every stroke, every movement. It was a respite, however brief, from the horror that had become my life, and I was thankful for it. It gave me a chance to forget everything for a while, allowing us to express emotions I no longer thought we were capable of.

However, everything has a consequence, and that was no exception. It was hard for him to accept, but he was just as much a part of it as I was, and I like to think that he loved me too much simply to let go. Over the next nine months, I ran a terrible risk. Capture was all but a certainty for a woman who was pregnant. It was a high price to pay for the sake of forgoing a condom, but I don’t regret it. And I know he doesn’t either. It gave us something beautiful in a world where everything had fallen into decay. A son, who was both the best and the worst of each of us. A family to call our own.

I gave birth on the kitchen floor. Hardly a fitting place to begin a new life, but it was the best that could be done under the circumstances. We relied on prayers and luck, the closest thing we had to a doctor being Snape himself. It was chaos, and I was just thankful that there were no complications. It is certain I would not have survived otherwise.

Raising an infant is hard. This was something I had come to learn along the way. But, as difficult and as tiring as it is, it’s filled with joy too. For the first time since the Ward, I had a purpose other than combating a government that would not budge. Many say that it was wrong of me to bring a child into such an upset world, but I took no heed of their words. Bad things happen every day, only we are too blind to see them. It would have been foolish to deny the one thing we had left to call our own, to pass on something more important than genetics and hope. After all, the magic has to be kept alive, deep within blood and bone. We will never gain true freedom if there is no one left to fight, and even the best of us die in the end.

My son is nearly a man now. Sixteen years old, with both the eyes and the temperament of his father. You may even have known him. He disappeared too, mere months ago, lost in a cloud of smoke. It breaks my heart to think of him, of where he ended up. He could be anywhere. Every night I waited for him to return, held tight in the embrace of the only man I love more. I swore I would give anything to see him return.

And I did. I sold out my best friend, leading him down a dark and dangerous road I knew he would not survive. The path Harry walked was slippery, and he fell to his death, stabbed through the heart by someone who got too close. Harry wasn’t subtle enough for the job, and with each piece of information he brought back to me, the riskier his mission became. His death was a mistake, the wrong question asked by the wrong person. Yet, I felt it was justified. My son was alive, and thanks to Harry I knew. After all, Ginny was gone along with all the other Weasleys, and I am but a shell of the girl I once was, beaten black and blue by fate and circumstance. He had nothing left to live for.

I have no idea where my son is now.

_Nathan._

I still call his name out in the darkness, clinging onto a memory.

It is a cold, hard world we live in now. An unforgiving one that steals everything we have ever held dear. But we must never give up hope that things will improve, that they will get better.

I know why Albus wants me to write this down. I’ve seen enough of these in my time, written by those captured or worse, to know. It’s a testament to all that has happened to us. So I’m made it my business to document everything; the lies, the sins, and the love. Every last word, thought and deed will go down on paper, though through them we will not be seen in the best of light. I cannot lie anymore; all deception was torn from me along with my heart. I can only sin.

I am not a good person. You shouldn’t be reading this. The paper upon which these very words languish is kept close to my heart in both the figurative and literal sense. Only death can tear it from my cold, decaying grasp.

But, then again, you’re reading this. And I know what you’re thinking.

What got me in the end?

 


End file.
